“The universal tendency of things to become disordered is a fundamental law of physics—the second law of thermodynamics—which states that in the universe or in any isolated system, the degree of disorder always increases.

…it is a common experience that one’s living space will become increasingly disordered without intentional effort: the movement toward disorder is a spontaneous process requiring a periodic effort to reverse it.

Living cells—by surviving, growing, and forming complex organisms—are generating order and thus might appear to defy the second law of thermodynamics. How is this possible? The answer is that a cell is not an isolated system: it takes in energy from its environment in the form of food…..It then uses this energy to generate order within itself.…a direct linkage of the “controlled burning” of food molecules is required for cells to create and maintain an island of order in a universe tending toward chaos.”